A bullet tore through Jim Copenhaver's triceps on July 13, 2024, lodged somewhere deep inside his body, and spent the next two years destroying him from within. Colon damage. Nerve damage. A week in the hospital after the shooting itself, then a long road that never really ended.

He was 76.

House Republicans announced Copenhaver's passing this week, and if you don't remember his name, that's part of the problem. The Butler, Pennsylvania rally shooting produced one image the entire world remembers — President Trump, blood on his face, fist in the air — and one name most Americans know: Corey Comperatore, the volunteer firefighter who shielded his family and died on the spot. But there were others on those bleachers who took rounds that day and kept breathing, and Jim Copenhaver was one of them.

David Dutch was another, seriously wounded in the same volley of gunfire that grazed Trump's ear and killed Comperatore. The country moved on. The news cycle did what news cycles do. The men who survived kept dealing with what a assassin's bullet does to a human body over months and years — not in front of cameras, not with GoFundMe celebrity, just quietly, in pain, at home.

"We are deeply saddened by the passing of Jim Copenhaver, who was gravely wounded in the horrific shooting in Butler, Pennsylvania," House Republicans said in their statement. "Jim endured unimaginable hardship with strength and perseverance."

Two years of hardship. That's what a bullet lodged inside your body buys you when you show up to a political rally in America. Not a protest. Not a riot. A rally — the kind of thing Americans have attended since before there was a country to have rallies in.

The media spent approximately forty-eight hours after Butler pretending to care about political violence before pivoting back to calling Trump a threat to democracy. The same editorial boards that ran somber "we must lower the temperature" columns in July 2024 were back to comparing rally-goers to fascists by August. Jim Copenhaver was still in recovery. Nobody called for an update.

"We join his family and loved ones in mourning his loss and praying for them during this difficult time. May he rest in peace," the House statement continued.

There's a specific cruelty to a wound that doesn't kill you right away but never lets you go. Comperatore's sacrifice was immediate and total — a father stepping in front of his daughters, gone in an instant. Copenhaver's was slower. A bullet in the triceps that traveled, that damaged his colon, that wrecked his nerves, that gave him two years of something no one would call living.

The investigation into the Butler shooting produced a congressional task force, a Secret Service director's resignation, and a stack of reports about security failures. What it didn't produce was accountability for the fact that an American citizen went to see his president speak and came home with a bullet he'd carry to his grave.

Jim Copenhaver was 76 years old. He went to a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He didn't go home the same man.

Two years later, he didn't go home at all.